Warning, there’s a graphic image of a man stoned to death at the link to the Chicago Tribune’s story.
Eugene Williams was a teenager who drowned after being attacked for swimming at a segregated Lake Michigan beach. His death was a primary spark of the 1919 so-called “race riot” in Chicago, which had already been on the boil for months.
William Lee, of the Chicago Tribune, reports:
The young Black teenager whose death at the hands of a white stone thrower at a segregated lakefront beach sparked Chicago’s worst race riot will receive a grave marker 102 years after his death, thanks to citizens wanting to right an old wrong.
A group of concerned citizens, who helped raise nearly $5,000 for a stone half ledger to be placed atop the grave of Eugene Williams in Lincoln Cemetery, is also setting up a special memorial service for the 17-year-old who drowned near the 29th Street Beach, unofficially a whites-only area.
The memorial is tentatively set for late July. The new 3-by-3½-foot grave marker will feature a telling of Williams’ life and death in July 1919. The funds were finalized last year, but the pandemic delayed the delivery of the ledger, organizers said.
More at the link, warning of a graphic image.
Robert Loerzel reported in an excellent Chicago Magazine article:
For nearly a week in the summer of 1919, Chicago descended into “a certain madness,” in the words of the city’s leading black newspaper, the Chicago Defender. White mobs assaulted virtually any black person they could find on the streets, and blacks engaged in deadly acts of retaliation and self-defense. By the time the violence subsided, 38 men — 23 of them black and 15 white — had been killed and more than 500 people were injured. “Chicago is disgraced and dishonored,” the Chicago Daily Tribune declared. “Its head is bloodied and bowed, bloodied by crime and bowed in shame. Its reputation is besmirched. It will take a long time to remove the stain.”
Jolting Chicago during the early years of the Great Migration, the riot cast a shadow over race relations in the city for decades. A hundred years later, it remains the worst outbreak of racially motivated violence in Chicago’s history — and one of the deadliest nationally.
The Chicago Magazine’s story of the Red Summer of 1919 continues to include a day-by-day retelling of the ensuing events.
The other day, President Joe Biden spoke at remembrance ceremonies in Tulsa. He stated: "My fellow Americans, this was not a riot. This was a massacre.”
While he spoke, just a few miles away, workers were excavating at Oaklawn Cemetery in search of the unmarked graves of the victims of the 1921 massacre of Black men, women, and children.
At the end of the first day they had found 174 bodies.
These killings weren’t a “race riot,” they were a massacre.
Many thanks to the Black Kos community for never letting the memories fade.